MinGW and Python

[sturlamolden]

Ames Andreas wrote:

> 1) psychological issues:  'convenient IDE', 'better debugger'

I prefer Eclipse when using MinGW. That IDE is on par with Visual
Studio. And Python will be developed for GCC anyway.


> 2) legal issues:  redistribution of msvcrXX

That is indeed the problem. msvcrXX cannot be redistributed with MinGW
binaries. On the other hand, msvcrXX cannot be redistributed with
py2exe standalones either. The current dependency on msvcrXX makes it
illegal (mostly) to distribute standalone applications made with
py2exe. You have to rely on msvcrXX  already being installed in a
system folder.

The solution must be to get the msvcrXX dependency out of Python.


> There remains one technical issue that isn't a killer but would
> be inconvenient, IMHO:  Can pywin32 be made working with a
> mingw-python (I'm quite sure it can't be made building on it)?
> I'd appreciate any datapoints about that ...

Two issues:

1. COM. MinGW is not know to be the best compiler for COM development.
Although MinGW binaries are COM ABI compatible.

2. MFC. A MinGW compiled MFC cannot be legally redistributed.